Read Online Bolivar: American Liberator by Marie Arana - Free Book Online Page A

Guillermo Aguirre, a nephew of the bishop’s whose letter he carried. Under Aguirre’s guidance, Simón mixed with Mexico’s high society and was presented to the powerful viceroy Asanza. Much has been written about Simón’s conversation with the viceroy and his supposedly plucky and incendiary references to revolution, which may or may not have been made. It is hard to believe that the Mexican sovereign would have engaged in political debate with a fifteen-year-old. But there is no doubt that they did speak and that the subject of their brief exchange was the blockade that prevented the San Ildefonso from setting sail. For all of Spain’s empire, for all the gold and silver of Mexico, the British had reduced Spanish trade to a standstill. Simón’s presence alone—a direct result of the blockade—was proof of Spain’s relative powerlessness. That thought cannot have been far from anyone’s mind.
    Along with Simón’s heady introduction to the Mexican society, it is said that he had his first romance while he was there. He had been known to flirt with pretty cousins in Caracas, had learned from his musical uncle, Padre Sojo, to dance, and he had turned into something of a dandy in his frilly lace collars and handsome waistcoats. But after twenty-five days of boredom and idleness in the port city of Veracruz, Simón was given an opportunity to act on amorous impulses.
    She was María Ignacia Rodríguez de Velasco y Osorio, a marriedwoman of twenty-one. She was flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, the daughter of aristocrats, and she had been introduced to Simón by his hostess, the Marquesa of Uluapa, who was her older sister. His romance with María Ignacia was instantaneous, ephemeral, wedged into a brief eight-day dalliance, but as the two were very much at home in the marquesa’s house, they managed tosnatch a few private moments in a narrow staircase of an upper floor. “The blond Rodríguez,” as she was called,already had quite a reputation in Mexico City. Married at fifteen, this indefatigable voluptuary would scandalize Mexico with a string of husbands and scores of lovers, among them the Mexican emperor Agustín de Iturbide and Baron Alexander von Humboldt, who proclaimed herthe most beautiful woman he had ever seen. It’s impossible to know whether this romantic encounter was a first for Simón Bolívar. Certainly, it was the first time he had engaged with a woman as a fully independent male, free from the oversight and encumbrances of family.
    Simón finally returned to Veracruz and departed for Havana when the blockade lifted, on March 20. Soon, his ship joined an even larger convoy and headed north,making its wary way past the Bahamas toward the Chesapeake Bay. The captain of the convoy had decided to follow the North American coast until his ships were well past danger, risking a longer trip and the possibility of exhausting their supplies. In Havana, they had taken on cattle, goats, sheep, chickens—enough food and water for sixty days. The trip would take seventy-two. Caught in a violent storm as they approached Cádiz, the fleet scattered; the San Ildefonso tossed alongside the coast of Portugal, toward northern Spain. By the time it pulled into the Basque port of Santoña, it stank of rancid cheese and a pestilential bilge of the blood of animals. Burned by relentless sun, buffeted by angry winds, the sailors were a ragged lot. As they squinted through rain at the gray huddled houses of Santoña, they must have felt great weariness and hunger. But they had evaded war.
    SPAIN HAD BEEN AT WAR for six long years, and it would be at war for twenty-six more, until its strength was sapped and its standing as one of the most powerful nations in the world was ancient memory. King Carlos IV had become a laughingstock in his own country. A man of shallow abilities and a weak will, he had relinquished all power to his primeminister, Manuel de Godoy, who had been cuckolding him for years. At seventeen, Godoy had